'Like the great fertility and awe-inspiring presence which is to be found where two great rivers converge. So, also, is the crucial importance of 'borderlands' where people of different ethnic, cultural and religious backgrounds are contiguous to one another.
What happens here, can have great influence on, and implications for the relationships between these citizens, in the wider society.'
In probably every multi-cultural and multi-ethnic society, there are those privileged and pioneering humans who are living at the edge, or in the diverse cultural borderlands.
Those geographical locations where the interaction between the society's different ethnic and culturally discrete groups, is at its most extensive and intensive display.
These areas of heighten inter-ethnic and cultural activities, can be likened to the different overlapping circles of a socio-gram.
With the activities occurring mostly in the shaded areas where each component ring permeates those bordering it, and is itself permeated by them.
In mutual embrace, if you like. It is in these areas that I believe the mutual embracing of the different ethnicities and cultures can take place.
Where people, citizens of different ethnic, religious and cultural backgrounds, have the opportunity to come together.
To learn about each other, not through reading or being told about ones ethnic, religious and social differentiation.
But through seeing, hearing, touching and being touched by each other.
It is the milieu through which people of different ethnic, religious and cultural origins, come together, probably even being forced together by circumstances.
And having to develop and foster a spirit of common interests, commonality, of accommodation, and, eventually, assimilation.
Yes, it does not always have positive outcomes, because, as is sometimes said, familiarity can breed contempt, hatred and communal conflicts.
To be continued
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